Calculating God (6 page)

“It is either coincidence piled on top of coincidence,” said Hollus, “or it is deliberate design. And there is more. Take water, for instance. Every lifeform we know of evolved in water, and all of them require it for their biological processes. And although water seems chemically simple—just two hydrogen atoms bound to an oxygen—it is, in fact, an enormously unusual substance. As you know, most compounds contract as they cool and expand as they heat. Water does this, too, until just before it starts to freeze. It then does something remarkable: it begins to expand, even as it grows colder, so that by the time it does freeze, it is actually
less
dense than it was as a liquid. That is why ice floats instead of sinking, of course. We are so used to seeing that, whether it is ice balls in a beverage or a skin of ice on a pond, that we usually give it no thought. But other substances do not do that: frozen carbon dioxide—what you call dry ice—sinks in liquid carbon dioxide; a lead ingot will sink in a vat of molten lead.

“But water ice floats—and if it did not, life would be impossible. If lakes and oceans froze from the bottom up, instead of the top down, no sea-floor or lake-bottom ecologies would exist outside equatorial zones. Indeed, once they had started freezing, bodies of water would freeze solid and remain solid forever; it is currents moving unfettered beneath surface ice that promotes melting in the spring—that is why glaciers, which have no such currents beneath them, exist for millennia on dry land adjacent to liquid lakes.”

I returned the eurypterid fossil to its drawer. “I grant that water is an unusual substance, but—”

Hollus touched his eyes together. “But this strange expanding-before-freezing is hardly the only remarkable thermal property water has. In fact, it has
seven
different thermal parameters, all of which are unique or nearly so in the chemical world, and all of which independently are necessary for the existence of life. The chances of any of them having the aberrant value it does must be multiplied by the chances of the other six likewise being aberrant. The likelihood of water having these unique thermal properties by chance is almost nil.”

“Almost,”
I said, but my voice was starting to sound hollow, even to me.

Hollus ignored me. “Nor does water’s unique nature end with its thermal properties. Of all substances, only liquid selenium has a higher surface tension than does water. And it is water’s high surface tension that draws it deeply into cracks in rocks, and, of course, as we have noted, water does the incredible and actually expands as it freezes, breaking those rocks apart. If water had lower surface tension, the process by which soil is formed would not occur. More: if water had higher viscosity, circulatory systems could not evolve—your blood plasma and mine are essentially sea water, but there are no biochemical processes that could fuel a heart that had to pump something substantially more viscous for any appreciable time.”

The alien paused. “I could go on,” he said, “talking about the remarkable, carefully adjusted parameters that make life possible, but the reality is simply this: if any of them—any in this long chain—were different, there would be no life in this universe. We are either the most incredible fluke imaginable—something far, far more unlikely than you winning your provincial lottery every single week for a century—or the universe and its components were designed, purposefully and with great care, to give rise to life.”

I felt a jab of pain in my chest; I ignored it. “It’s still just indirect evidence for God’s existence,” I said.

“You know,” said Hollus, “you are in the vast minority, even among your own species. According to something I saw on CNN, there are only 220 million atheists on this planet out of a population of 6 billion people. That is just three percent of the total.”

“The truth in factual matters is not a democratic question,” I said. “Most people aren’t critical thinkers.”

Hollus sounded disappointed. “But
you
are a trained, critical thinker, and I have described to you why God must exist—or, at least, must have at one time existed—in mathematical terms that come as close to certainty as anything in science possibly could. And still you deny his existence.”

The pain was growing worse. It would subside, of course.

“Yes,” I said. “I deny God’s existence.”

6

“Hello, Thomas,” Dr. Noguchi had begun on that fateful day last October, when I’d come in to discuss the results of the tests he’d ordered. He always called me Thomas instead of Tom. We’d known each other long enough that casual names were surely appropriate, but he liked a little bit of formality, a touch of I’m-the-doctor-and-you’re-the-patient distance. “Please sit down.”

I did so.

He didn’t waste time on a preamble. “It’s lung cancer, Thomas.”

My pulse increased. My jaw dropped.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

A million thoughts ran through my head. He must be mistaken; it must be someone else’s file; what am I going to tell Susan? My mouth was suddenly dry. “Are you sure?”

“The cultures from your sputum were absolutely diagnostic,” he said. “There is no doubt that it is cancer.”

“Is it operable?” I said at last.

“We’ll have to determine that. If not, we’ll try to treat it with radiation or chemotherapy.”

My hand went immediately to my head, touching my hair. “Will—will that work?”

Noguchi smiled reassuringly. “It can be very effective.”

Which amounted to a “maybe”—and I didn’t want to hear “maybe.” I wanted certainty. “What—what about a transplant?”

Noguchi’s voice was soft. “Not that many sets of lungs become available each year. Too few donors.”

“I could go to the States,” I said tentatively. You read about that all the time in the
Toronto Star
, especially since Harris’s cutbacks to the health-care system had begun: Canadians going to the States for medical treatment.

“Makes no difference. There’s a shortage of lungs everywhere. And, anyway, it might not do any good; we’ll have to see if the cancer has spread.”

I wanted to ask, “Am I going to die?” But the question seemed too much, too direct.

“Keep a positive attitude,” continued Noguchi. “You work at the museum, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“So you’ve probably got an excellent benefits package. You’re covered for prescription drugs?”

I nodded.

“Good. There’s some medication that will be useful. It’s not cheap, but if you’re covered, you’ll be okay. But, as I say, we have to see if the cancer has spread. I’m going to refer you to an oncologist down at St. Mike’s. She’ll look after you.”

I nodded, feeling my world crumbling around me.

Hollus and I had returned to my office. “What you’re arguing for,” I said, “is a special place in the cosmos for humanity and other lifeforms.”

The spiderlike alien maneuvered his bulk to one side of the room. “We
do
occupy a special place,” he said.

“Well, I don’t know how the development of science went on Beta Hydri III, Hollus, but here on Earth it’s followed a pattern of repeatedly dethroning us from any special position. My own culture thought our world was at the center of the universe, but that turned out to be wrong. We also thought we had been created full-blown by God in his image, but that turned out to be wrong, too. Every time we believed there was something special about us—or our planet or our sun—science showed that we were misguided.”

“But lifeforms like us are indeed special,” said the Forhilnor. “For instance, we all mass the same order of magnitude. None of the intelligent species, including those that vacated their worlds, had average adult body masses below fifty kilograms or above 500 kilograms. We all are, more or less, two meters along our longest dimension—indeed, civilized life could not exist much below 1.5 meters in size.”

I tried again to lift my eyebrows. “Why on Earth would that be true?”

“It is true everywhere, not just on Earth, because the smallest sustainable fire is about fifty centimeters across, and to manipulate a fire you need to be somewhat bigger than it. Without fire, of course, there is no metallurgy, and therefore no sophisticated technology.” A pause, a bob. “Do you not see? We all evolved to be the right size to use fire—and
that
size is poised directly in the logarithmic middle of the universe. At its maximum extension, the universe will be some forty orders of magnitude larger than we are, and its smallest constituent is forty orders of magnitude smaller than we are.” Hollus regarded me and bobbed up and down. “We
are
indeed at the center of creation, if only you know how to look at it.”

When I started working at the ROM, the entire front part of its second floor was given over to paleontology. The north wing, directly above the gift shops and deli, had always housed the vertebrate-paleontology displays—“the Dinosaur Gallery”—and the south wing had originally housed the invertebrate-paleo gallery; indeed, the words “Museum of Paleontology” are still carved in stone along the top of the wall there.

But the invert gallery had been closed ages ago, and in 1999 the space was reopened to the public as “The Discovery Gallery,” precisely the kind of edutainment mind-candy Christine Dorati likes: interactive displays for kids, with almost no real learning going on. The subway-poster ads for the new gallery bore the slogan, “Imagine if the Museum were run by an eight-year-old.” As John Lennon once said, it’s easy if you try.

Our pride and joy in vert paleo is our duckbilled
Parasaurolophus
skeleton, with its glorious, meter-long head crest. Every specimen you’ve ever seen anywhere in the world is a cast of our mount. Indeed, even the Discovery Gallery contains a cast of our
Parasaurolophus,
lying on the floor, embedded in fake matrix. Kids whack at it all day long with wooden mallets and chisels, mostly resting their bums on the magnificent skull.

Just out front of the vert-paleo gallery there is an indoor balcony, looking down on the Rotunda, which has a subtle star-burst design laid into its marble floor. There’s another balcony on the opposite side, out front of the Discovery Gallery. Between the two, above the glass-doored main entrance, are three vertical stained-glass windows.

While the museum was closed to the public, I took Hollus through the vert-paleo gallery. We’ve got the best collection of hadrosaurs in the world. We’ve also got a dramatic
Albertosaurus,
a formidable
Chasmosaurus,
two dynamic mounts of
Allosaurus,
an excellent
Stegosaurus,
plus a Pleistocene-mammals display, a wall covered with casts of primate and hominid remains, a La Brea tar-pits exhibit, a standard evolution-of-the-horse sequence, and a wonderful late-Cretaceous underwater diorama, with plesiosaurs, mosasaurs, and ammonites.

I also took Hollus over to the hated Discovery Gallery, where a cast of a
T. rex
looms over the hapless, floor-mounted
Parasaurolophus.
Hollus seemed enchanted by all the fossils.

In addition, I showed him a lot of paintings of dinosaurs as they might have looked while alive, and I had Abdus go get a copy of
Jurassic Park
on video so Hollus could watch that.

We also spent a lot of time with crusty old Jonesy, going through the invertebrate-paleo collections; Jonesy’s got trilobites up the wazoo.

But, I decided, fair is fair. Hollus had said at the outset that he would share information his people had gathered. It was time to start collecting on that. I asked him to tell me about the evolutionary history of lifeforms on his world.

I’d assumed he was going to send down a book, but he did more.

Much more.

Hollus said he needed some room to do it properly, so we waited until the museum closed for the day. The simulacrum wavered briefly in my office, then disappeared. We found it easier for me to just carry the holoform projector from place to place than for the simulacrum to walk with me through the corridors of the museum, since almost everyone—curator, grad student, janitor, patron—found an excuse to stop us and chat with the alien.

I took the staff elevator down to the main floor, to the wide stone staircase that wound around the Nisga’a totem pole to the basement. Directly below the main Rotunda was what we imaginatively referred to as the Lower Rotunda. This large, open space, painted the color of cream-of-tomato soup, served as the lobby for Theatre ROM, which was located beneath the gift shops of the first floor.

I’d had support staff set up five video cameras on tripods, to record what Hollus was going to show me—I knew that he didn’t want people looking over his eight shoulders when he was doing his work; but he understood that when he was giving information to us as payment, we had to make a record of it. I placed the holoform projector in the middle of the wide floor and tapped on it to summon the Forhilnor genie. Hollus reappeared, and I heard his language for the first time as he gave further instructions to the projector. It was like a little song, with Hollus harmonizing with himself.

Suddenly the lobby was replaced with an incredible alien vista. Just as with the simulacrum of Hollus, I couldn’t tell that this wasn’t real; it was as though I’d been teleported across two dozen light-years to Beta Hydri III.

“This is a simulation, of course,” said Hollus, “but we believe it to be accurate, although the coloration of the animals is conjecture. This is how my world appeared seventy million of your years ago, just prior to the most recent mass extinction.”

My pulse thundered in my ears. I stomped my feet, feeling the reassuring solidness of the Lower Rotunda’s floor, the only evidence that I was still in Toronto.

The sky was as cerulean as Earth’s sky, and the clouds were cumulonimbus; the physics of a nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere laden with water vapor were apparently universal. The landscape consisted of gently rolling hills, and there was a large pond, limned by sand, located about where the base of the Nisga’a totem pole really is. The sun was the same pale yellow as Sol and appeared about the same size as our sun did to us. I’d looked up Beta Hydri in a reference book: it was 1.6 times as wide as Sol, and 2.7 times as bright, so the Forhilnor homeworld must have orbited it at a greater distance than Earth orbits our sun.

The plants were all green—chlorophyll, another compound Hollus argued showed signs of intelligent design, was the best chemical for its job no matter what world you were on. The things that served the purpose of leaves were perfectly round and supported from beneath by a central stalk. And instead of having bark over whatever the wood-equivalent was, the trunks were encased in a translucent material, similar to the crystal that covered Hollus’s eyes.

Hollus was still visible, standing next to me. Few of the animals I saw seemed to be based on the same body plan as he was, although on those that were, the eight limbs were undifferentiated: all were used for locomotion; none for manipulation. But most of the lifeforms seemed to have five limbs, not eight—presumably these were the ectothermic pentapeds Hollus had referred to earlier. Some of the pentapeds had enormously long legs, raising their torsos to great heights. Others had limbs so stubby that the torsos dragged along the ground. I watched, astounded, as one pentaped used its five legs to kick an octoped into unconsciousness, then lowered its torso, which apparently had a mouth on its underside, down onto the body.

Nothing flew in the blue sky, although I did see pentapeds I dubbed “parasols” with membranes stretched between each of their five limbs. They parachuted down from trees, seemingly able to control their descent by moving specific limbs closer together or farther apart; their goal appeared to be to land on the backs of pentapeds or octopeds, killing them with poisonous ventral prongs.

None of the animals I saw had eyestalks like Hollus’s; I wondered if they had evolved later specifically to allow animals to see if a parasol was waiting to sail down on them. Evolution was, after all, an arms race.

“It’s incredible,” I said. “A completely alien ecosystem.”

I rather imagine that Hollus was amused. “That is much as I felt when I first arrived here. Even though I had seen other ecosystems, there is nothing more amazing than encountering a different set of lifeforms and seeing how they interact.” He paused. “As I said, this is my world as it would have been seventy million of your years ago. When the next extinction event happens, the pentapeds will all be wiped out.”

I watched a midsized pentaped attacking a slightly smaller octoped. The blood was every bit as red as terrestrial blood, and the cries of the dying creature, although two toned, coming in alternating anguish from separate mouths, sounded just as terrified.

Not wanting to die was another universal constant, it seemed.